Question

I’ve been learning C: it’s a beautiful, well-thought-out language. However, it is so low-level that writing any sort of major project becomes tedious.

What higher-level language has the most C-like syntax—but without all the clutter that you find in something like C++. Does one exist?

Answer 1

What higher-level language has the most C-like syntax—but without all the clutter that you find in something like C++?

I’m going to answer a slightly different question:

What is a language that is like C in that it is well designed and beautifully thought out, is like C in that it is good for systems programming, allows people to program at a higher level than C, and is relatively uncluttered?

I don’t think this question has a single right answer, but here are three worthy candidates (in alphabetical order):

• D. The D language is designed essentially as a better, cleaner C++. Like C++, D is explicitly designed to incorporate a lot of features, but one hopes in a cleaner, more harmonious way than C++. A major difference that enables programmers to work at a higher level is that memory is managed automatically by the language and safety is guaranteed by the compiler (and run-time system) through garbage collection.

• Go. Go scores very high on being well designed and beautifully thought out: Rob Pike is a master designer and has been practicing this particular craft for 25 years. Its explicit goal is to be uncluttered and to make systems programming “fun again”. Go is still a new language, and Rob has learned much from Squeak, Newsqueak, Alef, and Limbo. Because Rob understands that a great design is one with no unnecessary parts, Go is clean and uncluttered. Its primary features that are higher-level than C are type safety, garbage collection, and an excellent concurrency model.

• Java. Java has a well-designed core (see Jim Waldo’s book Java: The Good Parts) but unfortunately suffers from the clutter that any mature, successful language accumulates. The features of Java that make it most suitable for higher-level programming are interfaces, garbage collection, and exceptions.

The common thread here is using garbage collection to relieve the programmer of the burden of memory management. This is a major boost to productivity.

Each of these languages has much to recommend it. My own taste is for languages that are small and simple, and I admire Rob Pike’s body of work very highly, so if I had to pick one for myself, it would be Go, despite the fact that it is new and unproven.